Toon: My God, It's Full of Stars

We've stepped outside several times over the weekend in search of the aurora light show. I don't know whether it's light pollution from Foxconn, or from Milwaukee to our north, but we haven't caught the display everyone else on Earth seems to have.

Even with the clouds that came in Saturday night, some people in our area got some nice photographs, so we must simply have not waited outdoors long enough.

Q Toon: HAL No

16 years after the disaster that took the crew of Discovery One, and the dishonest media still refuse to cover the story. Sad! Stop all obelisks from entering U.S. until we find out what's going on!

Grim Anniversaries

Sloughback Saturday again...

A couple weeks ago, I included a cartoon about rank and file antipathy to the Latino-American Chief of the Milwaukee Police Department in 1991. Part of the MPA's grudge against Chief Arreola, stemmed from the suspension of police officers John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish.

Balcerzak and Gabrish had thwarted an attempted escape four months earlier by Konerak Sinthasomphone from serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer. In September, 1991, I depicted them behind then Milwaukee Police Association President Bradley DeBraska being interviewed by then Channel 4 news anchor Mike Gousha.

In panel three, I reference Sandra Smith and Nicole Childress, the African-American women who called police that night in May, 1991,

When police arrived at 25th Street early in the morning of May 27, Dahmer told them that Konerak was 19 years old, that he was a houseguest who had too much to drink, that he was his lover.
The boy, really 14 years old, was reportedly naked and impaired by drugs or alcohol, and police believed Dahmer`s story.
Smith and Childress tried to tell the officers that the boy was in trouble, but they refused to listen, telling the citizens to "get lost," Smith charged.
"One of them said to me, 'I`ve been investigating for seven years, and I don't need an amateur telling me what to do.'"
The officers then pursued their probe, telling the boy (whom one police source described as incoherent at the time) to sit on the car. They talked only with Dahmer.

Had Balcerzak and Gabrish checked Dahmer's criminal record, they would have found that Dahmer was a convicted sex offender -- convicted of assaulting Sinthasomphone's older brother. Yet astonishingly, according to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, the officers entered Dahmer's apartment, where the body of Tony Hughes was rotting in the bedroom, and found nothing amiss.

Balcerzak would later be elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association from 2005 to 2009. Gabrish is currently the Police Chief of Trenton, Wisconsin.

🗽

Since tomorrow is the 15th anniversary of 9/11, I'm reprinting here the cartoon I drew on 9/10.

I drew this cartoon to accompany the Milwaukee Business Journal editorial that week, eulogizing Milwaukee philanthropist Jane Bradley Pettit, who died on Sunday, September 9, 2001. The daughter and niece of the founders of Allen-Bradley Corporation, she was married to Schlitz Brewing heir Joseph Uihlein prior to her marriage to Lloyd Pettit; you can find those names all over the city of Milwaukee.

(I'm not sure what happened to the electronic version of this cartoon; I like the softening of the caricature, but the words were originally much sharper.)

I was busy scanning, cleaning up and emailing this cartoon to the Business Journal offices that Tuesday morning as the planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. I knew nothing of the attack until I was driving to work and heard NPR's reporting from the Pentagon as the third plane struck.

How to Handle a Womon

As promised, here is a cartoon from August, 2001 about whether a wymyn-only music festival should ban transgendered wymyn.

I knew this cartoon would piss people off, especially in Michigan, insofar as it came out during the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. It was inspired by a chat room discussion in which someone else had suggested the policy which the cartoon womon outlines.

Here are two letters to the editor of Between the Lines, the Detroit-based newspaper which has been running my cartoons since 1996:

Dear BTL,
Your newspaper claims to be for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders and friends and yet you found it appropriate to print a cartoon that characterizes women and lesbians in homophobic, mysoginist terms.
Would you find it equally appropriate to print a cartoon that characterized transexuals and transgenders in an equally derogatory way? Would you find it appropriate to print a cartoon that defined the trangender/transexual arguments with Michigan Women's Music Festival as the attempt of a bunch of men in skirts wanting into a women's only festival so they can slobber over the naked women?
This is exactly the amount of respect you have given to all of the people that actually support Michigan Women's Music Festival. We support the festival for very good reasons, reasons that are much more complex and thoughtful than the simple insulting characterization provided by the opinions cartoon.
--KR, 
Ann Arbor

✒

Dear BTL,
The cartoon on the "letters opinions editorial" page of Between The Lines for the week of August 16-22 is an insult to all of your many readers that support women only spaces.
The cartoon rests its humor on lesbian-phobic images and language. It portrays all women that support Michigan Women's Music Festival as out of touch radicals that insist on ridiculous language. These are the images that the homophobic press uses to trivialize feminists and women who choose to live without men as their primary partners. I am truly disturbed to find those sentiments reflected in BTL, a paper that says it is for the Lesbian community as well as the rest of our queer community.
The discussion illustrated in the cartoon further trivializes and insults those of us that for a number of reasons oppose the goals of camptrans. The cartoon tries to portray the issue as a "don't talk don't tell" conflict rather than the more salient issue of the right of women to create and choose to be in women only spaces that are focused on women's lives.
I would like to submit this letter for the letters to the editors section but would like to withhold my name. I am fearful that the backlash from some of the community for my expressing these feelings (and I am far from alone in them) would be severe if my name was provided. --Anonymous 

Me again.

Not all response to this cartoon was negative. A Washington, D.C. transgendered person wrote me to tell me she loved the cartoon and wanted to reprint it in her newsletter.

Incidentally, I wish more people would write in and join the discussion when they see a cartoon (or someone else's letter) with which they disagree. Most of my cartoons in the gay press are preaching to the choir --espousing a pro-gay position to a pro-gay readership -- and are unlikely to provoke much of a reaction. In this case, a dispute pitted one group of my readers against another. (My one other cartoon having anything to do with the Michigan Womyn's Festival made fun of Geraldo Rivera, not the festival.)

The only thing that troubles me about the above letters is that they seem to charge that it is homophobic to argue in favor of the transendered. Now, I confess that I am not a woman; nor am I transgendered. I readily concede that there is some value to having women-only spaces. There is, however, also some value to accepting transgendered MTFs as the women they believe they intrinsically are. Don't they face enough discrimination from the straight world without having to put up with it from the queer community as well?

September 13, 2001

Much has been said about the period of national unity that followed the 9/11 attacks. This cartoon is a reminder that the first to hurl accusations against other Americans were those on the religious right.
(Okay, there was also Ted Rall.)

September 10, 2001

The day before 9/11 was a Monday like any other Monday. In the morning, I scanned the above cartoon and sent three versions to Q Syndicate: a TIFF, a bitmap, a grayscale JPEG at 600 dpi and another at 100 dpi. I had drawn the cartoon Sunday night about Lynn Johnston's cartoon, "For Better or For Worse," in which one of the young characters had recently come out as gay. Some newspapers were deleting references to Lawrence's sexuality on the grounds that it was inappropriate for the funny pages.

I went to my job after that. I don't remember anything about the workday; the church where I work was planning for Sunday School Rally Day the following Sunday, so there would have been certain out-of-the-ordinary considerations for getting the bulletin started. An elderly woman was scheduled to come play piano for the senior citizens' group on Tuesday, and I remember that she was anxious about it and phoned for directions and details about how much music she should expect to play.

That evening, I got the e-mail from the Milwaukee Business Journal containing the first draft of that Friday's editorial, a eulogy for Milwaukee philanthropist Jane Bradley Pettit. My job for the BJ was to draw a weekly editorial cartoon to illustrate the editorial; my editor kindly attached a couple of photos of Mrs. Pettit to his e-mail. I spent most of the evening drawing the cartoon below, listening to Monday Night Football on the TV. (The Denver Broncos beat the New York Giants). I'm pretty I spent longer deciding what to draw than actually drawing it.